Category: openstack

Mentoring is one of those activities key in any open source communities as well as in any other environment such as internally at companies. The new edition of the OpenStack gender report [to be published], produced by Intel and Bitergia, has focused specifically on those programs that help newcomers and filling the existing knowledge gap.

Since last OpenStack Summit in Tokyo we were wondering at Bitergia if we could mix our knowledge on Software Development Metrics and some research we had done about gender/diversity contributions in Debian long time ago. Daniel started working on it, and he submitted a talk for OpenStack Summit in Austin that got accepted!

Public quarterly reports are used for understanding the performance of companies. And so, quarterly reports done by Bitergia fill the gap of understanding the performance of open source communities. This type of analysis focuses on those that are still interested in metrics, but do not have the time to play with the dashboards. This indeed provides a full overview of the current quarter, but adds a comparison with the previous quarters. This allows to have some extra context about where the community is heading.

The October-Devember 2015 penStack Community Activity Report shows a stable growth of the OpenStack Community. As new repositories and teams keep being added, the number of projects keeps growing. On the other hand it is worth mentioning the decrease in activity during the latest quarters in project teams such as Nova, or stabilization of some others, such as Horizon or Cinder. This is a clear signal of the maturity reached by the some of the project teams in the OpenStack Foundation.

Active Core Reviewers reach a new peak

Although Git activity (changesets merged in the code base) does not show a large increase of activity, if compared to Gerrit, the development effort in the project keeps increasing. This last quarter of 2015 the number of Active Core Reviewers reached a new record of 449 different developers.

Time to merge keeps decreasing

During the third quarter of 2015, a small increase in time to merge seemed to signal a change in trend. However, this last quarter of 2015 keeps the previous decreasing trend. During this period the median time to merge a changeset into master decreased from 2.91 days down to 2.38 days.

Efficiency closing tickets decreases

It is noticeable the decrease of the relative number of tickets closed in OpenStack projects (also known as the efficiency of the ticket closing process). Previous quarters topped at about 60% of closed tickets (with respect to tickets opened during the same period), while this quarter shows a much lower 44%. This could be seen as a poor performance indicator of the project teams.

However, the efficiency closing changesets in the review system (number of changesets merged or abandoned with respect to number of new changesets being proposed for review) remains stable at around 80%.

In a large free, open source software development community, not all developers are equal. Some are more experienced, some are better known, some know better how to adhere to the uses and customs of the project, some write code that is more easily accepted by others. One of the areas where these differences are more noticeable is the code review process. It is not equally easy for all developers to push their patches through code review. Even when the process itself tries to be fair and unbiased, well, “all developers are equal, but some are more equal than others”.

Fortunately, we have plenty of data in the code review system. We can use analytics on that data to learn about how difficult it is for developers to get their patches accepted. We will use a OpenStack code review dashboard, composed with data from the OpenStack Gerrit instance to illustrate the process.

During the last OpenStack Summit, in Tokyo, we presented the talk “The numbers of the Open Cloud“. Now it is online, including video and slides. The talk presented some aspects of the development process of OpenStack, Apache CloudStack, OpenNebula and Eucalyptus. It included some details about OpenStack, and some new Kibana-based dashboards for them (you can also have a look at our more recent OpenStack Gerrit activity and OpenStack Git activity dashboards).

This is the latest presentation of our series on quantitative analysis of the main free, open source software projects producing cloud infrastructure systems. See for example the first in the series, which was presented in OSCON 2014, and compare with the current situation.

This dashboard includes information about all review processes (changesets) in OpenStack, using information obtained from their Gerrit instance. For each review, we have information such as the submitter (owner), the time it was first uploaded and accepted or abandoned, the number of patchsets (iterations) needed until it was accepted, and the time until it was merged or abandoned. With all of them we have prepared an active visualization that allows both to understand the big picture and to drill down looking for the details. Follow on reading to learn about some of these details.

[Note: this is our second post about our dashboards based on Kibana. If you’re interested, have a look at the first one, about OpenStack code contributions.]

One of the nice things that these new dashboards allow is the level of filtering and drill down which is possible. For example, in the above dashboard, it is possible to click on any sector on a pie chart, on any entry of a table, on any bar in a bar chart, and the corresponding filter will act. This allows for obtaining specialized dashboards very easily, such as this one with the contributions by RedHat (produced by clicking on RedHat in the list of of top organizations, or the contributions to Liberty, the latest release cycle of OpenStack, by selecting the corresponding period (last bar) in the “OpenStack ten top organizations by release” chart.

If you’re interested in learning about some tips and tricks about what can be done with these dashboards, follow on reading…

Liberty is the new release of OpenStack. This shows an increase in activity and people participating in the development of OpenStack.

There are 25,268 commits in total merged into master thanks to the work of 1,873 different developers.

In order to have that code into master, it was necessary the effort of 2,239 people that submitted at least one patchset to Gerrit. That means that 83% of them are actual contributors of Liberty release.

In terms of community, Launchpad activity shows that 9,919 people helped participating in the bug tracking process, opening, commenting and closing tickets.

The mailing lists are a busy channel of communication with 1,742 participants, but IRC seems to be the preferred channel with more than 6,000 detected nicknames.

Ask.openstack.org is also an interesting communication channel where there have been 1,386 people participating and around 2,200 different questions.

As a disclaimer, this post will not focus on organizations participating in the OpenStack development, but in the software development process. Organizations information can be easily retrieved in the Activity Board. We believe that process in the OpenStack community is important and even more when we are talking about a team of more than 2,000 different contributors.

Efficiency of the community closing changesets

As mentioned, there have been more than 2,200 people in Liberty release that aimed at contributing with a patchset in the OpenStack community. And only a subset of those pieces of code were eligible to be part of the project and merged into master. However, not all of the people that were part of the that set were even reviewed. Each quarter, the community leaves around a 20% of the changesets population open. This can be observed in the following chart. The y-axis represents the percentage of changesets that were closed (abandoned or merged) per quarter (x-axis).

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Bitergia, the software development analytics company

Bitergia is focused on software development analytics. We aim to produce useful information about how software projects are performing, how different actors are contributing and how they could be improved.

We provide tools and means to track all these aspects, and to evaluate how policies and decisions are shaping the development processes.